An Approach Based on the Improved SVM Algorithm for Identifying Malware in Network Traffic

Due to the growth and popularity of the internet, cyber security remains, and will continue, to be an important issue. There are many network traffic classification methods or malware identification approaches that have been proposed to solve this problem. However, the existing methods are not well suited to help security experts effectively solve this challenge due to their low accuracy and high false positive rate. To this end, we employ a machine learning-based classification approach to identify malware. The approach extracts features from network traffic and reduces the dimensionality of the features, which can effectively improve the accuracy of identification. Furthermore, we propose an improved SVM algorithm for classifying the network traffic dubbed Optimized Facile Support Vector Machine (OFSVM). The OFSVM algorithm solves the problem that the original SVM algorithm is not satisfactory for classification from two aspects, i.e., parameter optimization and kernel function selection. Therefore, in this paper, we present an approach for identifying malware in network traffic, called Network Traffic Malware Identification (NTMI). To evaluate the effectiveness of the NTMI approach proposed in this paper, we collect four real network traffic datasets and use a publicly available dataset CAIDA for our experiments. Evaluation results suggest that the NTMI approach can lead to higher accuracy while achieving a lower false positive rate compared with other identification methods. On average, the NTMI approach achieves an accuracy of 92.5% and a false positive rate of 5.527%.